The Mullet

Chris Waddle may have retired from international duty, but his famous barnet hasn't. The most derided haircut in history has been selected to play against England tonight and will lead out the Scots at Wembley, proudly spilling down around (but crucially not over) the ears of captain Colin Hendry. Pioneered by David Bowie and championed by generations of footballers and entertainers, the long-back- and-short-sides of The Mullet have defied all rational explanation. Until now...

Hair, reduced to bare physiological facts, is not a glamorous thing. The American Heritage Dictionary describes it as "cylindrical, often pigmented filaments, characteristically growing from the epidermis of a mammal". Roy Blount Jr., in his 1986 book It Grows on You: A Hair- Raising Survey of Human Plumage, is even more, well, blount. He refers to hair as nothing more than "strings of diseased protein flecks, excreted by the follicles". Put like that, it's a wonder we get so worked up about the stuff.

The thing about these "fleck strings" - the ones on our heads, anyway - is that, for most of us, they sit atop our scalps in full view, perpetually open to ridicule. The strings are funny when they're cut badly, funny when there aren't enough of them, and absolutely hysterical when they're feebly combed over to disguise the fact that there aren't enough of them. As Mimi Pond wrote in her Splitting Hairs: the Bald Truth about Bad Hair Days (1998), "making fun of other people's hair" has become "a recognized spectator sport".

There is, of course, one hairstyle that stands alone as an object of modern ridicule. To those in the know it is referred to as the "mullet". Also termed "the ape drape", "the hockey head" and "the mud flap" (among its many aliases), the style is characterised first and foremost by its bi-level design. Short on top and sides, and long at the back, it essentially consists of two styles in one. Many people find it intensely risible. Indeed, for some of us, the main attraction of tonight's match between England and Scotland is the prospect of a second glimpse of the fabulous golden mullet of towering Scots defender Colin Hendry.

No one seems entirely sure whence the name derives. It may be connected to the old French word "mulet", meaning "dim", or even to the heraldic term "mullets of the field". "The best I can offer is the 19th century slang `mullethead', meaning a fool," says the lexicographer and pop historian Jonathon Green. "I can only assume that the hairstyle is some kind of anthropomorphic take on the fish."

Why has the mullet become ridiculous? The Egyptians, after all, wore their wigs in a distinctly mulletular style, and David Bowie - arguably the most avant-garde pop star of the last 30 years - put the modern mullet on the map with his bold, orange Ziggy Stardust cut of 1972. French revolutionaries such as Desmoulins and Romantic Brits such as Coleridge - not to mention such 18th-century icons as Gainsborough's Blue Boy - all sported hairstyles that were mullets in everything but name.

For this particular mullet-watcher the answer is simple. The hairstyle became ridiculous - in fact became the mullet - because of an Austrian footballer in the 1990 World Cup. I don't even remember the chap's name (Schtumpfel? Strudel?), but I'll never forget the two-tiered barnet that graced his Mittel-European bonce. On top it was spikily new-wave in that endearing Germanic manner, but at the back he let it all hang out, his "tail" fanning into the wind as he made daring sorties into the midfield. In its way it made for a magnificent spectacle.

But let us not forget our own Chris Waddle, of Spurs and England fame. Mullet cognoscenti will tell you that when Waddle snipped off his "tail" before the 1990 World Cup semi-final against Germany, he was all but condemning himself to missing a crucial penalty and putting his country out of the competition. (This Samson-esque theme seems to be a constant in mullet folklore: post-mullet, strength dwindles, careers nosedive, and women lose interest. Just ask the DJ Pat Sharp, who was "spinning" last month at a Mullet Night at the 333 club in Clerkenwell: the poor bloke could barely lift his box of Babycham bottles, openly confessing that he is "half the man I was" since shearing off one of the most spectacular mullets of our time.

There are people who believe it was American hip-hoppers the Beastie Boys who coined the term "mullet". The younger generation will even tell you it was mullet devotee Johnny Vaughan. The fact is, my friends and I were talking about "mullets" at least two years before the Beasties recorded their immortal 1994 song "Mullet Head" ("One on the sides, don't touch the back/Six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack..."). In America, the cut had been known for much of the Eighties as "the Guido", "the shlong", and "the neck blanket". Indeed, that fashion-challenged decade was the mullet's real heyday, a time when the style was seen atop the heads of countless actors, rock stars, footballers, and tennis players.

A partial list of mullet icons of the Eighties would have to include Paul McCartney, Lou Reed, Andre Agassi, Mel Gibson, the Rev Al Sharpton, Peter Stringfellow, Ian Botham, and Martina Navratilova a.k.a. the High Priestess of the Fe-mullet. But there were others whose mullets have been conveniently swept under the style carpet. The other night I watched the Comic Strip's A Fistful of Traveller's Cheques and was astonished to see that Nigel Planer, Dawn French and Rik Mayall were all fully mulleted.

None of these bi-level celebs could hold a candle to American singers Michael Bolton and Billy Ray Cyrus, the major poster boys for Planet Mullet. When Bolton stepped out of LA's session shadowland and loosed on the world that strangulated roar of a cod-soul voice, at least as important to his legions of worshippers was the golden mane that emerged from behind his ears and fell majestically to his shoulderblades. A recent piece in Tina Brown's Talk magazine astutely took Bolton to task for de-mulleting himself in the mid-Nineties.

Never has anyone come as close as hunky Billy Ray to realising the ultimate fantasy of male sexuality - a man at once mortal and divine, butch and sensitive, "short" and "long". After the huge chart success of "Achy Breaky Heart", Cyrus decided, like Bolton, to dispense with his "tail". Unlike Bolton, though, he quickly saw the error of his ways and grew it back again.

The mullet represents the best of both worlds and the best of all compromises, a hairstyle that lets you simultaneously achieve hardness and softness, conformity and rebellion, masculinity and femininity. The mullethead is the ultimate weekend warrior, a rebel with a washroom key, his hair the perfect pragmatic 'do for a post-postmodern epoch in which tribal signifiers have become blurred and ambiguous.

"Once it was easy to tell a music act by its hair," writes Mimi Pond in Splitting Hairs. "Long hair [meant] rock. Short hair meant something square, something Lawrence Welk-like. The Man. To youth, short hair was the problem, long hair the solution. These days, with the music industry exploding with all kinds of sounds, it's hard to tell who's on whose side."

The mullethead knows there are (literally) no "sides" anymore - that the mullet is both "for" and "against", "inside" and "outside", "part of" and "apart from". Indeed, one might argue that, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, the mullet is both ego (the short, neat top) and id (the long, flowing back) - an analogy which extends into the realms of both sex and sociology.

In his 1958 essay Magical Hair, the anthropologist Edmund Leach suggested that in most cultures long hair signified "unrestrained sexuality", short or partially shaved hair signified "restricted sexuality", and close-cropped hair signified "celibacy". A very Fifties way of looking at the subject, you might say. Eleven years later, C D Hallpike countered with a late Sixties piece entitled Social Hair, arguing instead that long hair signified being "outside society" while short hair signified "re-entering society".

Neither of these profs could have predicted a hairstyle which had it both ways: predicted, in other words, that the mullethead's short top and sides would conform - socially and sexually - while his "tail" promised carnal joy and rebellion. If Gananath Obeyesekere, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton, is right that there seems to be "an oppositional dialectic" between loose hair and hair that is tightly groomed or bound, then the mullet can be said to have brought those poles together. It's Apollo and Dionysus, order and disorder, in one magnificent flowering.

It is probably evident by now that I have moved from a position of mullet- mocking to one of discreet admiration. To me, the modern mullethead possesses a kind of heroism, a defiance of good taste and received "cool". Unswervingly, he moves through a uni-level universe with his bi-level stance and attitude. Now it seems the world at large is waking up to the mullet's inner beauty and potency. Indeed, both Gucci and Lagerfeld decided to employ mulletheads in their spring fashion shows. Gucci even went as far as to countenance the use of a bi-level neo-Ziggy androgyne in its main ad campaign for 1999.

Asked last year if "an Eighties revival could once more make the mullet a viable hair option", the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch rightly replied that the mullet was "not a specific thing of the Eighties... it has such a huge history".

In this age of smirking irony, the mullet stands for a kind of vestigial innocence and pride. Rock stars such as Lou Reed may have lopped off their locks, but a quarter-century since David Bowie first officially unveiled it, the mullet continues to delight and seduce - an eternal symbol of tempered fertility and regulated regeneration. For those about to "sho- lo", we salute you.

`The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods', by Mark Larson and Barney Hoskyns, is published by Bloomsbury on 9 December at pounds 9.99